by Clark Howard
“I know.” Slim understood. “It was that way for me in the pen. Al, too. Everybody, I guess.”
They rode in silence for a while, her hand still on his arm, shoulders touching, each still with somber thoughts, not yet in the shower of sunshine that would warm them. Then Ava broke the spell by squeezing his arm, saying, “Oh, look, we’re there!”
As they joined a stream of people into the big park, Ava pressed twenty dollars into Slim’s hands. Slim turned red. “I don’t much like this arrangement,” he said.
Hands on hips, Ava warned, “Don’t give me any trouble, okay? I’ve been planning this for a long time and I mean to have fun.” She bobbed her chin at one of the park’s three rollercoasters, the Silver Streak. “I’ll bet you’re afraid to go on that.”
“I’m not afraid of nothing,” Slim said. Half under his breath, he added, “That’s why I’m in trouble so much.”
They went on the Silver Streak, sitting close together in a little enclosed cage on wheels, gripping a safety bar that locked back over their knees, while the train rose and fell and curved and sped along it narrow-gauge track as if racing toward doom. Slim clenched his jaw as his knuckles turned white; Ava, ripe-plum eyes wide, screamed from first turn to last. Staggering off, they headed for the nearest bench.
“That was fun,” Ava said defiantly.
“Sure was,” Slim forced himself to agree. “What’s next?”
They looked around. There were two more rollercoasters, the Greyhound and a monster called the Bobs, which had the steepest drop–two hundred feet–of any ride in America. Nearby was another ride called the Caterpillar, which went up and down low hills in a circle. There was a line of children waiting to go on it. Ava and Slim looked at each other and laughed—then went and got in line with the children.
For a while that day they were two people all alone in the world, knowing no one, no one knowing them, like two children turned loose in a wonderland. They went on every ride they came to except the other two rollercoasters; they ate hot dogs and cotton candy; they tried for prizes in a shooting gallery, where Ava outshot Slim, who failed to hit the target once. “Some big-time crook you are,” she chided afterwards.
Sometime during the afternoon, they began to hold hands, to touch, to hug when they were happy. At a penny arcade, they posed for separate metal-framed photos from a machine, which they exchanged. Ava turned her face slightly to the left to conceal her pocked cheek, blushing as she did so. On a ride called Mill on the Floss, which was a long leisurely boat trip through a series of dark tunnels, they kissed for the first time.
“I don’t care if you are married,” Ava whispered breathlessly. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
“Neither have I,” Slim admitted.
From the start, their kisses were passionate. Lips parted, Ava tried to devour him; body alive again after so long, Slim tried to devour her back. Turned awkwardly toward each other in the flat-bottomed boat, they pressed their upper bodies together; Slim put a hand under her blouse and cupped her breast; Ava moaned softly into his open mouth and squeezed the inside of his thigh. The ride ended much too soon.
It was dusk when they left the park. In a shadowy doorway on their way back to the streetcar stop, they paused a few minutes to kiss over and over, pressing their whole bodies together now, squirming against each other with a mutual fever that was consuming them. Slim tried to pull her skirt up to take her right there.
“No, not like this,” Ava said. “Later, tonight. Come to the back gate at midnight.”
“I feel like I’m about to explode,” Slim said.
“Explode tonight,” Ava told him. “In me.”
Chloe at first could not believe Richie when he said he had seen his daddy out the window on Kedzie Avenue. The boy had such a wild imagination. And lately, since Jack had come into her life, there was no length to which he would not go to get her attention. So she thought he was making it up.
But the possibility nagged her nevertheless, Finally, she got two dollars worth of change and telephoned her mother from a sit-down booth in the candy store.
“Hello, Mamma,” she said when the phone in Lamont was answered.
“Lord Almighty, girl, I have been worried sick about you,” Mrs. Clark complained at once. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a letter from you?”
“Mamma, is Richmond out of the penitentiary?” Chloe asked without further preliminary.
“Yes, he is,” Mrs. Clark verified. “I wrote you that he was, but the letter came back saying you’d moved. I’m your mother, Chloe, I think the least you could do is let me know you’re still alive now and then.”
“All right, Mamma. All right. I’m sorry and I’ll do better. Do you know where Richmond is?”
“I know he’s not around here. The law’s already been here looking for him; he was supposed to stay in the county until his probationary release was done.”
“You didn’t tell him where I was, did you?”
“You know better. I don’t treat you like you treat me.”
“Oh, Mamma. Don’t start in on me. I’ve got problems.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s different. I’ve never had problems myself.”
Chloe placated her mother for as long as she could until the operator said her three minutes were up. Hanging up, she went out on the street and stood, wary eyes scanning the block. It did not really matter, she thought, whether her mother told Richmond where she was or not. Richmond was like a bloodhound; he would have—he had—found out somehow. Nervously lighting a cigarette, hurrying back to the apartment, she thought grimly of what she had to do now: stay ahead of him. Too far committed to Jack to back out, she must not, at all costs, allow Richmond to catch up with her.
In the bedroom of the apartment she paced, chain smoking, talking to herself, scolding Richie and sending him away when he came to the bedroom door. As soon as Jack arrived, she barely let him pause to give Richie his nightly Baby Ruth before urging him into the bedroom and closing the door. Richie went immediately to the keyhole to listen.
“I’ve got to get out of Chicago,” he heard his mother say tensely. “How soon will you be ready to move to Gary?”
“W-what’s the m-matter?” Jack asked.
“My husband is out of prison. He’s looking for me. I think he may be close to finding me.”
“J-Jesus.” Through the keyhole, Richie saw Jack Smart begin to pace. “There’s a b-big game coming up n-next Saturday night. At Ritter’s T-tavern on Fulton Street. If I c-could win big in it, I th-think we could get out of town r-right away.” Jack adjusted his knit tie and stretched his neck an inch. “Only th-thing is,” he said worried, “it’s a t-time game. You gotta agree to p-play till midnight unless you g-go broke. You can’t quit w-winners. But maybe we can figure a w-way around that.”
“Oh, Jack, I hope so,” Chloe said nervously, putting her arms around his neck. “I’m scared, hon. I’m really scared.”
Jack patted the back of her head. “D-don’t worry, kid. I won’t 1-let nobody hurt you. I don’t give a g-goddamn if he is your husband.”
Listening and watching through the keyhole, Richie now knew for sure that his mother believed him about seeing his daddy from the window. When he first told her, he had done it to hurt her, but had secretly hoped she would restore his faith in her by going out and trying to find his daddy. When she did not, he began to wonder if she even believed him. Now he knew. She believed him, all right, but she was not going to try to find his daddy, she was going to run away from him.
With Uncle Jack.
Mack answered the garage phone and turned to hand it to Slim. “For you.”
Slim’s heart accelerated. There was only one reason he would be getting a telephone call. “Hello—”
“This is Jerry Green, the bartender at Ritter’s. You know, on Fulton Street. I got a tip for you about your friend Jack Smart. You did say there was another five in it, didn’t you?”
&
nbsp; “I’ll come by and pay you tonight,” Slim said.
“I’ll be here till eleven.”
When Slim hung up, Mack asked, “Find him?”
“I’ll know tonight.”
Later that day, when Slim was washing a car in the alley, Ava came through the gate and leaned back against the wall to smoke a cigarette and visit with him.
“Mamma Teresa and Mafalda get back from San Francisco tonight,” she said. “I’m going downtown with Ralph to meet them at the depot. We’ll be back about nine. I’ll still meet you in the backyard at midnight.”
“Okay.” Slim told her about the telephone call from the bartender. “I’ll be going down there right after work.”
“God, I hope you find them,” Ava said. “The quicker we get this thing settled, the better I’ll like it.” She looked down at the ground, avoiding his eyes. “Have you decided yet what you’re going to do?”
Slim shook his head. “I know what I want to do.” Pausing in his work, he stared at her across the hood of the car. “I want to be with you. But I want my little boy too. And I don’t really know if I’ve got reason to take him away from Chloe. I ain’t heard her side of the story yet. All these bits and pieces that I’ve picked up, they could all be wrong. This feller Jack Smart might be Estelle’s boyfriend, not Chloe’s. Could turn out that she’s been true to me all this time. If she has, why, then I owe her something. You see that, don’t you?”
“I see it,” Ava acknowledged. “I don’t like it, but I see it.”
“You wouldn’t want me to be less than a man about it, would you?”
When he got off work, Slim went back to his room and cleaned up, then made the long streetcar trip to the West Side. It was just getting dark when he walked into Ritter’s Tavern on Fulton Street. Behind the bar was a stocky man wearing a shirt with Jerry stitched above the pocket. Slim sat at the end of the bar and put down a five-dollar bill. Jerry came over and asked, “What’ll you have?”
“You called me,” Slim said, tapping the bill with one finger.
“Oh, yeah. I wasn’t sure if it was you or not.” Jerry drew a glass of draft beer and put it on a cardboard coaster in front of Slim. “On the house.” Leaning closer on one elbow, he said in a confidential tone, “On Saturday night there’s a big game set for our back room. Smart’s one of the players that’s bought a chair. Game starts at seven and the play is for five hours, until midnight, except if a guy goes broke.” Jerry’s eyebrows went up. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Slim said and pushed the bill to him.
Sipping his beer, Slim thought: it’s been a long road home. But he would have made it if he got his little boy back. And if Chloe had waited for him, and he had to give up Ava, well, that was just how it would have to be. The main thing was to get the hell out of Chicago, get back down south where he belonged. There was the question now of his violation of probationary release to face, but if his daddy took him back on the farm, and if he explained how he had to go up to Chicago to find his wife and son, maybe they would go easy on him and give him another chance.
He was going straight and he wasn’t running—that ought to count for something.
At ten minutes before midnight, Slim crept up to the backyard gate of the Capone mansion, prepared to wait there in the dark shadows until Ava came out. To his surprise, the gate opened at once and Ava’s hand reached out to draw him into the yard. Slim tensed; she had never been early before. “What’s the matter?”
“You’re in trouble,” Ava whispered as they moved a few feet along the inside of the wall and crouched down. “Ralph has got his men out looking for you. Three of them are waiting in your room.”
“What’s he looking for me for?” Slim asked, puzzled.
“Mamma Teresa and Mafalda got back from their visit to see Al,” Ava said. “He doesn’t remember you.”
“Doesn’t remember me? That’s crazy. I kept him from getting a knife stuck in his belly.”
“Listen to me,” Ava urged. “Al is sick. They haven’t told Mamma Teresa what’s the matter with him, but Mafalda knows. He’s sick with syphilis. The doctors think he’s had it for years without knowing it. They say it’s damaging his central nervous system. He has trouble concentrating on things.” Ava paused to stifle a sob that came from her breast. In the moonlight, Slim could see that her large lovely eyes were wet. “Mafalda said that when she and Mamma Teresa were talking to him, Al would look away and start humming to himself as if they weren’t even there.”
“Jesus . . . ,” Slim said, staring at her. It was beyond his capacity to imagine Big Al Capone in such condition. But he did not have time to dwell on it; he had to think about himself. “Don’t Ralph realize that’s why he didn’t remember me?” he asked. Ava shook her head emphatically.
“Ralph says no matter how sick Al was, he’d remember giving his word to someone who did him a favor. Ralph is convinced you lied to him just to get a job. He even thinks you might be a plant from one of the Irish mobs on the West Side—”
“Hell, that’s crazy. I’ve got to talk to him—”
Slim started to rise, but Ava seized his arm. “No! You can’t! He won’t listen to you, Slim! He’s ranting and raving that you made a fool of him; he says he’s going to kill you.”
“That’s crazy,” Slim said again. “Crazy.”
“You’ve got to get out of town,” Ava said.
“I can’t,” Slim said. He told her what he had heard from the bartender. “I’ll have to find a place to lay low until that game Saturday night.”
Ava took his hands. “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Come on . . .”
Ava led him across the dark backyard and down some steps into the basement of the Capone mansion.
“Nobody would ever think to look for you down here,” she whispered. “You can stay here until Saturday night, until that poker game. Maybe after that, you’ll be leaving town anyway.”
Slim felt for her and took her in his arms. “Maybe we’ll both be leaving town,” he said.
They clung to each other in the blackness.
15
The night of the big poker game at Ritter’s, Jack Smart took Chloe and Richie to eat supper at Thompson’s Cafeteria, several blocks from the tavern. While they ate, Jack explained again to Chloe his plan for getting out of the game early if he was winning.
“Nine o’clock is when I want you to c-come into the c-card room. There’s a ladies’ entrance on the side; the c-card room is to the left at the end of the b-bar. There’ll be people standing around watching the g-game; you and the kid stay b-back with them, but make sure I c-can see you, okay?”
“Yes, okay,” Chloe said. Nervous, she wished Jack did not need her help. Earlier, Richie had heard her say to Estelle, “Doing this kind of thing scares the hell out of me. But Richmond finding me scares me even more.”
In the cafeteria, Richie sat by the window, eating the food his mother had cut up for him and pretending, as usual, not to pay any attention to the adult conversation.
“If I’m losing when you c-come in,” Jack continued, “I won’t pay no attention to you; I’ll just keep playing. But if I’m winning, if I’m ahead enough to want to get out of the game, I’ll ask you what you w-want, understand? That’s when you say you have to t-talk to me for a minute. You say you’re s-sorry, but it’s an emergency. I’ll pick up my money and take a t-time out; that’s allowed, for p-players to take a leak or g-get a drink. We’ll g-go sit by the ladies’ entrance and w-when nobody’s paying any attention, we’ll sk-skip out.”
Chloe lit a cigarette, her hand unsteady. “I wish it was over,” she said. “What if somebody comes after us?”
“Nobody will,” Jack assured her. “I’m a r-regular player; they’ll never suspect what I’m d-doing.”
“Do I have to bring Richie with me?”
“It’ll look more legit that w-way, less like a s-set-up.”
Chloe crushed out the cigarette after one drag
. “God, I hope it goes all right. I don’t like things like this.”
“Everything will be f-fine,” Jack assured her.
Down the side street from Ritter’s corner entrance, Chloe found a door marked LADIES ONLY. Churning up her courage to go in, she cautioned Richie, “Now, you hold my hand, don’t pull away, stay right next to me, and don’t say a word while we’re in there, you hear me? We’re going to help Uncle Jack get us our bowling alley, but we have to be very careful how we do it. I’m depending on you to be good and do exactly as I say.” With a fixed, almost sick-looking half smile, she pushed open the door and they went inside.
Leading Richie by the hand, Chloe went through the tavern to the open door of a private room and edged inside among a dozen or so spectators already watching the card game. Maneuvering around the wall to the right of the door, she reached a spot where she could see Jack’s face at the table, and when he looked up he could see her. Richie, who could see nothing, tugged at her hand. At first she paid no attention, but he persisted. Bending, she warned, “I told you to be good.”
“I can’t see anything.”
Chloe sighed tensely. There was a chair nearby, against the wall; she pushed him over to it. “Stand on that. And don’t fall.”
On the chair, Richie could see over the shoulders of people in front of him, see the round, felt-covered table at which Uncle Jack and four other men sat, all of them with stacks of currency in front of them. There was little talk in the room; what there was, muted, came from the men at the table: “Raise twenty-five . . . Call. . . Two cards . . . Fold . . . Up to you . . . Pot’s right . . . .”